Hi all! My name is Alberto Garcia and this is my first (well, second) post in Planet Debian. So I ll introduce myself. I m a free software developer and enthusiast from Galicia, Spain. I studied computer science at the Corunha University, where I first heard about GNU/Linux and Debian. After leaving university I co-founded Igalia with a group of friends. We ve been working on lots of different things during all these years, but some projects we ve been particularly involved in include GNOME, Maemo/MeeGo and WebKit. Although I ve been using Debian for more than a decade now (my first -and still running!- installation was in 1997) and I m quite familiar with the distribution, it wasn t until a few years ago that I started maintaining packages officially. Apart from software, my other main hobby is music. When I m not using my computer you ll find me at some concert (preferably small bands: I hate long queues, crowded places and being far from the stage). It s no coincidence that my first Debian package was a Last.fm player ;) I don t have much more to add. I d like to thank Ana for adding me to the planet, and I m proud to be part of the Debian community!

During the OpenRheinRuhr I noticed that a friend of mine didn t know about zgrep and friends. So I told him what other grep variations I know and he told me about some grep variations I didn t know about. So here s our collection of grep wrappers, derivatives and variations. First I ll list programs which search for text in different file formats:

grep through what	Fixed Strings	Wildcards / Basic RegExps	Extended RegExps	Debian package
uncompressed text files	fgrep	grep	egrep	grep
gzip-compressed text files	zfgrep	zgrep	zegrep	zutils, gzip
bzip2-compressed text files	bzfgrep	bzgrep	bzegrep	bzip2
xz-compressed text files	xzfgrep	xzgrep	xzegrep	xz-utils
uncompressed text files in installed Debian packages	dfgrep	dgrep	degrep	debian-goodies
gzip-compressed text files in installed Debian packages	-	dzgrep	-	debian-goodies
PDF documents	-	-	pdfgrep	pdfgrep
POD texts	podgrep	-	-	pmtools
E-Mail folder (mbox, MH, Maildir)	-	mboxgrep -G	mboxgrep -E	mboxgrep
Patches	-	grepdiff	grepdiff -E	patchutils
Process list	-	-	pgrep	procps
Gnumeric spreadsheets	ssgrep -F	ssgrep	?	gnumeric
Files in ZIP archives	-	-	zipgrep	unzip
ID3 tags in MP3s	-	-	taggrepper	taggrepper
Network packets	-	-	ngrep	ngrep
Tar archives	-	-	targrep / ptargrep	perl (Experimental only for now)

And then there are also greps for special patterns on more or less normal files:

grep for what	uncompressed files	compressed files	Debian package
PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expression)	pcregrep (see also the grep -P option)	zpcregrep	pcregrep
IP Address in a given CIDR range	grepcidr	-	grepcidr
XPath expression	xml_grep	-	xml-twig-tools

One question is though still unanswered for us: Is there some kind of meta-grep which chooses per file the right grep from above by looking at the MIME type of the according files, similar to xdg-open. Other tools which have grep in their name, but are too special to properly fit into the above lists:

• ext3grep: Tool to help recover deleted files on ext3 filesystems
• xautomation: Includes a tool named visgrep to grep for subimages inside other images.

Includes contributions by Frank Hofmann and Faidon Liambotis.

Two days ago, I finally brought my system up-to-date with regard to the GNOME packages that I use. I was very reluctant because I am using a heavily customized gnome-panel and I waited until all the applets that I use have been ported to gtk3 and the libgnome-applet library. I am the Debian maintainer of one of these applets, link-notification-daemon, and I have made the changes and tested them in a chroot before, but now that I am actually using it, I found and fixed more visual glitches. I think by now it is as usable as it was before on GNOME 2. I am still looking for someone to step up as the new upstream maintainer for it! I had some trouble with gnome-session and notification-daemon, thought I found the cause and reported it, but a day later I could not reproduce it anymore. Weird. Other problems, such as the busy cursor not disappearing after the session start, or evolution going into a freeze also have stopped occurring by themselves.
Other problems I found and fixed, for example the battery status applet was not visible until a major state change, or panel applets were not loaded due to a race condition, or tooltips not working (which called for a fix in gtk+ itself). I also added to the xmonad package the files required to allow the user to select GNOME with Xmonad in GDM, and found out how to have Galeon appear in the list of possible default browsers.
I don t really have to say much about GNOME3 itself. I disliked the default font, Cantarell, mostly because of the extra spacing that reduced the number of folders and mail I can see in evolution. (Also see what nekohayo has to say about that.) I also was under the impression that the font is much lighter, and I started to adjust the position of my laptop monitor to increase the contrast. So I switch back to DejaVu Sans.
I also disabled the sleep-on-lid-close feature I often run backups, or download stuff, or compile stuff, or calculate stuff, so I want better control over this. So, I guess, now that everything is almost as it was in GNOME2, I can say I like it...

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Debian's libvirt in unstable finally passes the Technology Compatibility Kit (libvirt-tck) for qemu:///system:

Files=59, Tests=1579, 315 wallclock secs ( 0.77 usr  1.02 sys + 31.40 cusr 10.14 csys = 43.33 CPU)
Result: PASS

We're running libvirt's internal test suite since 0.9.0 but this doesn't launch any real virtual machines to check things like suspend, resume, snapshotting, migration and it doesn't create storage pools and volumes or networks. This means a lot of testing was done manually with each release. libvirt-tck provides a framework to perform these kinds of integration testing between libvirt and it's drivers, comes with hundreds of testcases already and it's easy to set up since it's available in experimental:

apt-get install -t experimental libvirt-tck

Edit /etc/libvirt-tck/default.cfg if you don't want to use the default connection URI. Then just run libvirt-tck:

libvirt-tck

Since this is supposed to stress libvirtd and the hypervisor and since it creates and deletes storage pools, networks and virtual machines it's recommended to run this on a dedicated system to make sure the tests don't blow away any precious config. If a test fails one can debug that single test using:

LIBVIRT_TCK_CONFIG=/etc/libvirt-tck/default.cfg prove --verbose /usr/share/libvirt-tck/tests/hooks/051-daemon-hook.t

This already revealed errors in our package like a missing parted build dependency breaking the creation of disk based storage pools, bugs in libvirt, crashes in QEMU and minor errors in the test suite itself. We're currently cheating a bit since the tests for hooks and nwfilter are currently disabled due to license problems with the used Perl modules. libvirt-tck can easily be integrated into Jenkins since it can now use libtap-formatter-junit-perl to generate JUnit XML. To do so simply configure a free-style software project to execute these commands:

rm -f libvirt-tck.xml
sudo libvirt-tck --timer --format junit --force > libvirt-tck.xml

allow Jenkins to run libvirt-tck as root

jenkins ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/libvirt-tck --timer --format junit --force

and configure it to publish a JUnit test result report. Currently I'm only running the tests for qemu:///system so any help running and debugging this for LXC, VirtualBox or XEN is very welcome. Many thanks go to Salvatore Bonaccorso for packaging the missing Perl modules needed by libvirt-tck.

I'm not exactly green, and yet the first time a given mister became prime minister of my country I didn't even have the right to vote. Now, I just feel relieved.

See also parts 1, 2, 3, and 4. This is the biggest highlight of our trip to Greece for me. I enjoy having the chance to meet people, visit for awhile, and make new friends and that certainly happened in Greece. In one of the shops we happened to step into, I noticed a radio behind the counter. That s not unusual itself; radios often catch my eye these days. But this radio was tuned to 21.070, an amateur radio frequency. So I asked the shop owner if he happened to be a ham. And indeed he was. He was Lakis (SV5KKU), and Terah and I had a great time visiting with him. Terah took some photos of us, and then we made our purchases and headed out. I had brought my HT (handheld radio, weighs a few ounces and is powered by batteries) with me, and Lakis told me about the repeaters in the area. I had known about some of that since I had emailed Panos of the amatuer radio club in Rhodes before leaving home (I found his name via Google). A couple of days later, on Tuesday, we found ourselves back in Lindos. It was mid-afternoon, so the shops were quiet. After a late lunch, I thought it would be nice to drop in on Lakis one more time, since we were scheduled to fly back the following morning. I m not sure how long we stayed it must have been at least an hour and enjoyed the fresh orange juice he prepared. After we got back to our hotel Tuesday, I learned that our flights on Wednesday were canceled due to a nationwide air traffic controller strike in Greece. After 3 hours on the phone with Delta (more on that experience later), we got rescheduled to fly back Friday. On Wednesday morning, I remembered that the Rhodes amateur radio club meets every Wednesday evening, and now I would be able to go! I knew how to contact Lakis by email and on the radio, and he kindly offered to pick me up and take me there. So that evening, I got a tour of his impressive mountaintop installation, and then it was on to the club the Radio Amateur Association of the Dodecanese (SZ5RDS). There I met Panos, whom I had emailed earlier (and I think surprised him a bit). It was a friendly group, and they translated into English for me every so often so I knew what was being discussed. When I was about to leave, they gave me this: The translation, partly from my memory and partly with the help of Google Translate, is:

Radio Amateur Association of the Dodecanese, SZ5RDS Our friend and radio colleague KR0L JOHN GOERZEN, who visited the island, has our recognition as an HONORARY CLUB MEMBER. PRESIDENT KAVALAKIS PANAGIOTIS SV5AZK (Panos) SECRETARY PAPADIMITRIOU CHRISTOS SV5DDT RHODES Oct. 5, 2011

(I hope that any Greeks reading this will send me corrections.) I truly appreciated that gesture and meeting all the people in the club. On the way back to the hotel, Lakis and I stopped by a restaurant, which I believe had the best souvlaki I ve ever tasted thanks! We brought some back for Terah. She had chosen to stay at the hotel that evening and had a small hotel meal earlier, but enjoyed the souvlaki and pita. Terah had explained to the ma tre d that I wasn t along that evening because I had gone to an amateur radio club meeting. Judging by the surprised reaction, this was probably the first time they had heard that particular comment! Experiences like this make travel fun and worthwhile. Thank you very much, Lakis and everyone in the club I hope to have a chance to visit again.

So, like many people, I have received GNOME 3 in the latest upgrade on Debian testing, and switched away to Xfce very soon after. What's amazing (to me) about this whole experience, however, is how easy it is to switch desktop environments in Debian. Two years ago, I fled KDE in very similar circumstances. I have since used Openbox, LXDE, GNOME, Xfce, as well as a few more obscure window managers in short-lived experiments. All of this was easy to do and worked flawlessly. Most of my settings, my preferred programs, and startup applications were preserved, and if I didn't like it, I could switch back without a problem. (Ironically, the upgrades from KDE 3 to KDE 4 and from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 lost far more settings than changes to other environments.) And of course you can mix and match applications from different environments, and these days this doesn't result in a visual crime. I don't know whom to thank for this, probably a combination of upstream developers, freedesktop.org guys, and Debian maintainers. Keep it up.

No matter whether you're a professional or hobby player, if you play Magic: The Gathering, you certainly visit Wizards of the Coast's homepage from time to time. And while other parts of the WotC's page have been made unusable without ECMAScript enabled, the MTG part can be used without it mostly. The one part, that didn't work (and I needed) was card links. They have some ECMAScript to fetch the image from the Gatherer and overlay that on the current page, if you hover over a card link. If you click, it's again some script, that opens a Gatherer window. I just want all card links to be plain links pointing to the respective entries in the rather lightweight magiccards.info card search, which displays all relevant data in a compact layout. Today I finally got around to throw the ten or so lines of ECMAScript together, Greasemonkey needs to make that happen. If you like to give it a try, you can download it from my Greasemonkey script collection (direct link for the impatient: wotc_with_noscript_and_card_links.user.js). As an additional note: I'd like to point out, that there are other scripts available from userscripts.org which can do the same. But all those scripts did a lot else (like using jQuery to fetch the image on mouse over from magiccards.info).

The Age reports that Adobe has ceased development of Flash for mobile systems [1]. This is described as leading to an improvement in the web experience for iPhone and iPad users, but the more important thing is that it will improve the experience for everyone. The Flash plugin has always been a resource hog and has never been properly supported on all the common platforms. Also most sites that use Flash never needed to as there were other ways of getting equal or better results without it. Now that Flash is officially on the path to obsolescence everyone can move to HTML5. I use the following configuration directives in my Squid configuration to block Flash, I selectively enable Flash for the few web sites which use it for useful things. Blocking flash in this manner means that desktop systems which have the Flash plugin installed probably won t be vulnerable to Flash security flaws as it is unlikely that one of the few sites that I permit to send Flash to my network would end up hosting hostile Flash code. acl swf url_regex swf$ swf\?
acl swftype req_mime_type -i ^application/x-shockwave-flash$
http_access deny swf
http_access deny swftype Wikipedia has a comparison of HTML5 and Flash. One interesting benefit that is claimed for Flash is that it allows DRM and it supports inserting commercials and in other ways giving the user an experience that they don t want. It seems that to put some more nails in the Flash coffin we need tools to suck video from Flash sites regardless of DRM and which skip commercials.

• [1] http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/adobe-surrenders-to-apple-in-mobile-flash-war-20111110-1n85p.html

If you ever get an error message from the blktrace tool that looks like this:

BLKTRACESETUP(2) /dev/dm-0 failed: 2/No such file or directory
Thread 3 failed open /sys/kernel/debug/block/(null)/trace3: 2/No such file or directory
Thread 2 failed open /sys/kernel/debug/block/(null)/trace2: 2/No such file or directory
Thread 0 failed open /sys/kernel/debug/block/(null)/trace0: 2/No such file or directory
Thread 1 failed open /sys/kernel/debug/block/(null)/trace1: 2/No such file or directory
FAILED to start thread on CPU 0: 1/Operation not permitted
FAILED to start thread on CPU 1: 1/Operation not permitted
FAILED to start thread on CPU 2: 1/Operation not permitted
FAILED to start thread on CPU 3: 1/Operation not permitted

Don t be alarmed your disk hasn t suddenly disappeared out from underneath you. In fact, it means quite the opposite of what No such file or directory might imply. In fact, it means that there is already a blktrace of that particular block device in progress, and you ll need to kill that one off before you can start another one. Thank $DEITY for the kernel source code it was the only hope I had of diagnosing this particular nit before I went completely bananas and smashed my keyboard into small pieces.

The other day, I was asked if it was really possible to get build-arch support in Wheezy (as in, buildds using build-arch) by adding these optional targets. Lets have a look at the data that is available to us:

• At least ~500 packages must be fixed (the reduced set )
• The Wheezy freeze is expected in June (as I recall, I may be off)
• NMUs can take quite a while, so lets reduce it to May.

To simplify my calculation I will assume we can fix packages over a course of 150 days (which is 5 months of ~30 days or every day in Dec to April). So 500/150 = 10/3 =~ 3.3 packages from the reduced set should be fixed every day. Erring on the side of caution, we should make that 4 packages every day. So if we fix 4 packages from the reduced set every day, we will definitely fix all of them before Wheezy. But the reduced set are only the source packages that could possibly benefit from having a build-arch target (it builds both arch:all and non-arch:all packages). There could (and probably will) still be sources building non-arch:all packages without a build-arch target. Furthermore, with the rate of 4 a day we will only have a month to get dpkg and buildd support In short, no. I do not expect us to get archive-wide build-arch support on buildds for Wheezy. But I will do my best to ensure that option #4 flip the switch becomes very attractive early in the Wheezy + 1 development schedule. I hope you will join us in this endeavour. Most of the time it is a trivial 3-4 line fix and often you can even throw in some hardening flags to spice it up a bit. The easiest way to help is to fix your (team s) packages listed in the reduced set . Once you are done with that you can look at the rest of your (team s) packages (see the full dd-list). The most important thing to remember is that Build-Depends-Indep is still broken! That is, you cannot rely on Build-Depends-Indep being installed on a buildd in the build target. So any existing workarounds have to stay for now (i.e. check for certain commands or deferring indep till binary-indep is called). If you are in doubt about how to fix a certain package feel free to ask for help. Note: I pull the data directly from lintian.d.o (full set) and UDD (reduced set). I try to remember to refresh it daily. The full set is basically (z)grep cut uniq on the lintian log, the reduced set is found using the UDD query from this script (based on a query done by Jakub Wilk). Since all data is (in)directly based on lintian.d.o only packages that are in sid are considered.

The bug webinterface of the Ultimate Debian Database currently knows about the following release critical bugs:

In Total:	1869
Affecting Wheezy:	1211
Wheezy only:	155
Remaining to be fixed in Wheezy:	1056

Of these 1056 bugs, the following tags are set:

Pending in Wheezy:	54
Patched in Wheezy:	197
Duplicates in Wheezy:	48
Can be fixed in a security Update:	33
Contrib or non-free in Wheezy:	12
Claimed in Wheezy:	0
Delayed in Wheezy:	10
Otherwise fixed in Wheezy:	87

Ignoring all the above (multiple tags possible) 684 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributors to get Debian 7.0 Wheezy released. However, with the view of the Release Managers, 1105 need to be dealt with for the release to happen. Please see Interpreting the release critical bug statistics for an explanation of the different numbers.

After over five years, I've decided to retire from the Debian Games Team. The games team has been a fun group to work within Debian: packaging doom-related programs was my route into Debian and I've really enjoyed it. Spare time is very tight at the moment, and I'm not dedicating much at all to Debian work. Within that, I'd quite like to try and focus on some other areas. Good luck to the team going forward!

Today I was removing KDE from my laptop, when I realized that kde-window-manager would not go away (even when it was automatically installed) since it provides x-window-manager, which is needed by gdm. I manually removed it, but that got me thinking that maybe I had other packages that were in this situation. So I picked aptitude and tried to build some search-fu. Here is the resulting query:

aptitude search '?for x:

 ?x:installed

 ?x:automatic

 ?x:provides(?virtual ?reverse-depends(?installed))

 ?not(?x:reverse-depends(?installed(?depends(?=x))))'

Now, lets go over the query. The first part ?for x: allows us to refer to the package currently being matched. See the documentation for details. We'll see later why we need this. Basically we are saying: give me all packages x that match the following pattern. The second and third parts are trivial: we only want automatically installed packages.
The fourth part, ?x:provides(?virtual ?reverse-depends(?installed)) was easy: find all packages that provide a virtual package that is depended upon by some other installed package.
The fifth and final part, ?not(?x:reverse-depends(?installed(?depends(?=x)))) is why we needed the bound variable x. We want to filter out (hence the ?not) the packages that have some reverse dependency that depends directly on the package x. That way, in my case, metacity won't show up since gnome-core directly depends on it and is installed.

Unfortunately, this query doesn't grok alternative dependencies. For example, if gnome-core depended on metacity x-window-manager then this query wouldn't show metacity, since it is depended upon by a package. If someone can make this query understand that so that it only eliminates packages directly depended upon with no alternatives dependencies, please let me know!Tags: aptitude, cleaning, tip, tips

This blog post isn t only directed to ThinkPad owners as most notebook Linux users with Intel Core Duo 1/2 and i3/i5/i7 processors have been affected by this bug if not all. And yes, this problem is present on latest Debian Unstable and Ubuntu 11.10. Prelude I m owner of Thinkpad X300, great machine except the fact that just recently I replaced its 3rd cooling fan! Yea, I do a lot of compiling and it s on all the time, but still this kind of things shouldn t happen. I first linked this problem to the fact that Thinkpad fan on Linux (as of 2.6.22) always works at what s its basically maximum RPM, thus the reason there are numerous fan control scripts. My favorite one is Thinkfan, but controlling fan doesn t really help if you have a overheating problem. For matter of a fact it working on its maximum speed might only help, with its own toll. As of kernel 2.6.38 up until 3.1 (still present) there has been a problem of power regression but besides this I had slight problem with overheating. Regarding overheating in beginning I tried reporting bugs, tried different Thinkfan configurations, blamed proprietary software such as Adobe Flash for spiking up CPU temperature, however this problem was somewhat solved. After numerous battery calibrations and as these didn t work in the end for battery life getting poorer with each day, I just blamed the factor that notebook was getting pretty old (~3 years). Then the consumer woke up inside of me and I thought it was time to get new notebook. I laid my eyes upon ThinkPad X1 thing of beauty except one mayor drawback, its price. I did some reading on X1 and interesting enough, X300 comes with Core Duo 2 L7100 but overheating + power regression was still present even on latest Intel Core I* series. Reading this killed the consumer and woke up the hacker side. Solution Initial workaround to the problems of power regression is to add pcie_aspm=force besides existing GRUB boot arguments, this did help to some point but what really helped in both cases was also adding i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 or at least I thought so since this line only applies to Sandy Bridge (i3/i5/i7) and latter. In the end my /etc/default/grub looks like:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash pcie_aspm=force i915.i915_enable_rc6=1"

and make sure you run update-grub after making these changes. Besides the arguments I used there are other ones you can use and for more info please head to Tweaks To Extend The Battery Life Of Intel Linux Notebooks . Results I ended up with such simple tweak are more then satisfactory as I got some ~45 extra minutes of battery life besides the fact that it lowered temperature by some ~10 C. Guess this also gives me extra time until I get a chance to lay my hands on X1 P.S: After I posted this some argued that this is a workaround rather then a fix and folks at [Phoronix] just posted what they call a proper solution to this problem. Also please note although Sandy Bridge users that enable this might sometimes get a video corruption bug, i915_enable_rc6 is still supposed to get enabled by default in 3.2. So logical conclusion you can come up with is unless you re troubled by this problem, you might not want to use this work around/fix at this point. And hope it ll be fixed in future releases of your favorite Linux distribution.

http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20111110.144615.333c5288.en.html Date: 2011-11-10 16:46 +200
To: DebConf Team
CC: debconf-discuss
Subject: [Debconf-team] Debconf13 in Riga, Latvia bid
Hello all, I will be concise and to the point. This email is a formal bid to organize Debconf13 in Riga, Latvia. You can find all the relevant information on the appropriate wiki page: http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf13/Latvia All the plans have been solidified over the last few months and the backup options are there only for unforeseen disaster scenarios (like a big fire burning down the primary venue or something like that). The only details that are not nailed down are the final location for the day trip and formal dinner as the vendors did not want to give us such quotes and tentative reservations so far in advance, but even there we have primary and backup options planned already. We are trying to keep everything about this bid simple and predictable, so we hope you ll enjoy it.
Best regards,
Aigars Mahinovs

First event of my trip was somewhat a gimmick: Give a 30 minutes talk on FreedomBox to an audience of 1 person, in the transit area of Heathrow airport, London. A guy from India now living in London helped preparing my visit to India, an was eager to participate - so much that he was willing to drive out to the airport to meet me. The meeting failed, unfortunately: My flight got delayed, and my one-man "audience" got caught in other duties. Fun to try nevertheless. Also looking back, that crazy attempt to squeeze in a meeting during a 1 hour stop-over was an indicator of the general pace of the India trip This text is part of my Asia 2011 scriblings.

phpMyAdmin demo server got some updates recently. First of all I've updated MySQL and MariaDB version it uses (MySQL is now on 5.5.7 and MariaDB on 5.3.2). Later I've finally found time to make mentions of demo server less intrusive and fit more in existing interface. I've used jQuery to inject information about demo server to main page as one of standard boxes. It fits there nicely and puts information on main page where most users land anyway (you can see it for example here). With most important information on main page, the other pages could be reduced and now only mentions demo server and Git revision it is using. This brings user experience closer to real phpMyAdmin without intrusive information shown on top of every page. I hope you will like it :-).

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In the past few weeks I ve been preparing the Debian packages of FileTea and its companion EventDance. They re finally available. FileTea is a free, web-based file sharing system that just works. It only requires a browser, and no user registration is needed. If you want to know more about it, you can read my previous blog post. For a more detailed description, read Nathan Willis s excellent article on LWN.net. There have been a few changes since that article (HTTPS support in particular) but it s still the best one you can find on the net. Igalia still provides a FileTea server at http://filetea.me/, that you can use to share your files and see how it works. We plan to keep offering this service, but you don t need to trust it/depend on it anymore: now you can apt-get install filetea and have your own.

I've been unable to solve this problem for a few weeks now, so i'll try posting it to my blog maybe someone out there knows the answer. Would very much appreciate a clue on this one. I've got a VM on a citrix xenserver 5.0.0 machine that won't start. it was running fine until it was rebooted on a Fri afternoon, a few weeks ago. Starting it from the (windows-only) xencenter GUI results in:

   "This VM cannot be started, as its network interfaces could not be
   connected. One of the NICs is in use elsewhere."

Starting it from the command line results in:

# xe vm-start uuid=88915b63-d794-e021-4f78-b03f46e352b0
Cannot plug VIF
VIF: 5dfd3886-8b48-20e5-4231-30284d7b185d

anyone seen this before? know how to fix? I've tried deleting and re-creating the network interface for the VM. I've also tried booting the VM without any network interface at all. I've tried "xe vif-unplug force uuid=5dfd3886-8b48-20e5-4231-30284d7b185d" (doesn't work, expects the VM to be running, not halted). In fact, I've lost track of all the things i've tried doing that haven't worked. I haven't rebooted the xen server and *really* don't want to have to do that. I'd rather create a new VM and copy the OS (debian, fortunately so relatively easy to do) than reboot the server (NOTE: Tried that, didn't work). Since the initial problem, I now have a total of three VMs that won't restart (with the same error message), and I can't even create a new VM. So it looks like a problem with the host rather than the guest. I think i'm going to have to migrate all the VMs off this machine to another box, then rebuild this server. maybe with a newer Xen (on debian, rather than proprietary citrix junk), or maybe as a KVM box. The (absence of) this kind of crap is one of the main reasons why i prefer KVM to Xen .and if i have to rebuild the server anyway, I may as well rebuild it as a KVM server Xen VMs won t start: Cannot plug VIF is a post from: Errata